


The World of Yesterday

by blithers



Category: Sky Captain & the World of Tomorrow (2004)
Genre: F/M, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-20
Updated: 2014-12-20
Packaged: 2018-03-02 07:34:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,636
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2804585
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/blithers/pseuds/blithers
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Polly Perkins is nineteen, a cub reporter for the Chronicle, and has a penlight between her teeth the first time she meets the man who would eventually be known as Sky Captain.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The World of Yesterday

**Author's Note:**

  * For [veteratorianvillainy (skeptics_secret)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/skeptics_secret/gifts).



> Happy Yuletide, veteratorianvillainy!
> 
> Thank you to my beta readers, htbthomas and ghostcat. You ladies are the bee's knees.

**1\. Meeting**

Polly Perkins is nineteen, a cub reporter for the Chronicle, and has a penlight between her teeth the first time she meets the man who would eventually be known as Sky Captain.

She is also breaking into what she thinks is an abandoned farmhouse, which is turning out to be not as abandoned as she’d initially thought if the man tied hand-and-foot to a wooden chair in the basement is any indication.

“Who are you?” the man asks hoarsely, once she finishes untying the gag from his mouth.

“Polly Perkins. Who are _you_?”

“I’m the guy who was in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

He’s skinny, with a shock of floppy brown hair and the sort of face one grows into. She hesitates before untying the knots around his wrists, and he licks dry lips, continuing, “I run a… delivery service, of sorts. The man that owns this place used to be a client of mine.”

She takes a step back and crosses her arms over her chest. “You work for these thugs.”

“ _Used_ to. And then I learned what they actually do.”

“Right.”

“Wait, don’t -“ he protests as she shoves the gag back in his mouth.

Then she raises her camera and takes a picture of him.

“Should have done that before untying you the first time,” she explains cheerfully, starting to loosen the gag for a second time. “Unprofessional of me, really.”

He coughs, a dry, breathless hack. “Unprofessional?”

“I’m a reporter,” she explains, a note of pride in her voice despite her best efforts, and he groans, letting his head drop back.

“Right. Of course you are.”

***

“Exactly how did you get here again?” Joe asks, glancing around a corner.

“I told you, I stowed away in the back of the delivery van. Which seems to have… left.”

She hadn’t expected to need to plan for a getaway as well as a rescue. Jumping in the back of the van had been an impulsive move, a gamble. A girl doesn’t always have time to plan the next step, after all.

“It’s a good thing,” he says then, a bit smug, “that my delivery business happens to be airborne.”

She stops dead. “You have a _plane_.”

He nods.

“An actual plane.”

“That’s what I said.”

Joe’s plane turns out to be a single engine crop duster with a guttural engine and wings as skinny as one of Polly’s fingers, the name DOTTIE stenciled in black along the side. It’s also a single seater.

“Where exactly am I supposed to sit?” she asks, peering through the cloudy glass at the bucket seat positioned behind a control panel studded with switches and alert lights.

Joe looks into the bubbled cockpit next to her, then gives her a sly sideways look. “Guess you’ll have to wrap your legs around me, sweetheart.”

“I should tie you back up to that chair for talking like that.”

He has the decency to look abashed. “You’re right, that’s no way to treat my rescuer.” He hesitates. “Sorry, though. You’ll still have to sit in the back.”

She rips her skirt up to the thigh climbing into the cluttered-up cockpit, Joe’s hand wrapped around her ankle like that’s what’s going to keep her upright and balanced on the plane’s paper-thin wings. She adopts a modified side-saddle, both knees wedged between Joe’s left hip and what looks ominously like the emergency parachute.

“Ready?” he yells over the thrum of the engine.

“Get on with it, flyboy,” she yells back, somewhere in the vicinity of his right ear.

The takeoff is terrifying. The ground falls away underneath them like a trapdoor in her stomach, and she’s suddenly, intensely aware of the rivulets shaking in the thin skin of metal that surrounds them, the frailty of the laws of science, lift and drag, push and pull, the invisible forces that their tiny lives depend upon.

But then she looks downward, outside the window, _flying_ , and her entire life changes.

She raises her camera, dazed, and snaps a picture.

 

 

**2\. Dottie and Dex**

The next time she sees him he’s wearing a flight jacket, thick brown leather with sheepskin at his throat, so new that the leather almost squeaks.

She’s glad she wore lipstick that morning.

His plane is new as well; steel sides gleaming, like something out of the movies. She drags a finger along the edge of the front propeller, silver the clean color of tin, and purses her lips at him.

“She’s a beaut, Joe.”

Joe lays a hand on one of the wings. “Old Dottie didn’t make it out of Singapore. The rust and rot of the jungle finally caught up with her.”

“This girl have a name yet?”

“Not yet.”

“What are you waiting for?”

“The right name, I suppose.”

She circles the propeller, bringing herself a step closer to him. “Two seats this time, I see.”

He squints at her.

“I said, _two seats this time_.”

He lifts an eyebrow quizzically.

“Oh, for heaven’s sake. Take me up in your plane, Joe. I don’t care where we go. Timbuktu, Kalamazoo - wherever the story is. Just take me with you.”

“Slow news day, eh Polly?”

She tightens her grip on her camera strap. “You owe me and you know it.”

He takes a step closer to her this time, leans in close. She can smell the muskiness of the new leather of his jacket. His hair is slicked back, dark and neat. It makes his ears look too big for his head, makes him look young, boyish. He puts his lips next to her ear and whispers,

“How do you feel about Idaho?”

“ _Idaho_?” she shrieks.

“There’s a buddy of mine I’d like you to meet,” is all he says, and he tosses her a pair of goggles.

***

The whiskey burns the back of her throat like smoke and kerosene. Dex is sitting to her right, drunk as a skunk, face shining and giggling intermittently. Joe’s got his flight jacket shrugged off on her other side. His arm is thrown over her shoulders and keeps bumping up against Dex, his fingers ghosting against Dex’s shoulder.

“To Idaho!” she toasts, and they all tap their glasses drunkenly together.

It turns out, Idaho is pretty swell in her book.

 

 

**3\. Saving the World, The First Time Around**

“The red wire or the green wire?” she asks again, blinking sweat out of her eyes. Her hands are shaking. She tries to still them.

“Isn’t there a blue wire?” Dex asks from underneath the console, sorting rapidly through soldering and wires and vacuum tubes and bits of counting devices that Polly has only a dim, hypothetical knowledge of.

She focuses, looks again. “No. No blue wire.”

“Dex,” Joe snaps, hair plastered to his forehead, sleeves rolled up to his forearms. “We need to stop this thing.”

“I’m working as fast as I can, boss,” Dex says placidly, and Polly sees his legs twitch out of the corner of her eye, next to her heels.

She remembers Baumgartner’s office. The books had all been filed in a neat rows, catalogued, color-coordinated. He’d seemed like a very traditional, unimaginative sort of man.

Her hand drifts toward the red wire.

“Thirty seconds,” Joe says.

Nothing, and then, fast, “Red, Polly. Cut the red.”

She pulls the wire taut and cuts it with the knife in her hand, closing her eyes after she sees the severed line. She takes a breath.

She takes a second breath.

Then, slowly, she opens her eyes.

She’s still alive.

_Alive._

“Dex, you brilliant boy,” Joe breathes. Polly feels her face breaking out into an enormous smile that she couldn’t contain even if she wanted to.

Dex rolls himself out next to her feet, goggles pushed up on his forehead, lopsided. “Did it work?”

Polly hauls Dex to his feet and kisses him, smearing red lipstick. Joe whoops behind her and slaps Dex hard on the back, then grabs his face with both hands and kisses Dex as well, hard and fast on the mouth.

Polly takes a step back, brings her camera up, and takes a picture of a very bewildered Dex, the dismantled wreckage and a single red light still lit up behind him.

 

 

**4\. Married**

Joe knocks at the door, once, twice. The door opens an inch, a thin line of yellow light smearing out onto the mud and dirt, and Polly’s knees almost give out in relief.

“Qu'est-ce que c'est?” A suspicious eye takes them in through the crack in the door: their general disarray, the visible injuries, and their clothing, which was unfit for the storm they’d found themselves in after being forced down in an emergency landing in the south of France.

“Je m'appelle Joe,” Joe says in thick, schoolboy French. “Nous sommes… ah, injured. Hurt. Blessé?”

The eye shifts to look at her, sharp and skeptical, and Joe puts a protective arm around her waist.

“Ma femme,” he explains, and only the numbness and tiredness keep her from jolting.

***

“Your _wife_ ,” she repeats, when they’re finally alone.

Joe hisses, flinching away from the clean rag pressed against his forehead. “It’s called a _cover story_ , Polly.”

“Really.”

He squints at her with his good eye. “It seemed like the smart thing to do.”

She slaps the rag back into the water basin. “Did it now.”

“Yes. Here, you should sit. We need to get you off that ankle of yours.”

She frowns down at her rapidly swelling ankle, in something of a judgmental mood. “Drat and blast.”

“The ankle, or me as a husband?”

“Both,” she says tartly, then sucks in her breath as Joe gently rotates her injured foot. “Ouch.”

“If you can say the word ‘ouch,’ you’ll recover. Here…” He stacks embroidered pillows at the end of the bed, and helps her sit up against the headboard, elevating the ankle. “That’ll help.”

She settles back. “Thanks, Joe.”

He doesn’t look up from the rag he’s washing. “Anytime.”

***

They trek back to the crash site the next morning, Polly’s humor worsening with each limping step. But the sight of Joe’s downed plane, wings askew, nose buried in the ground like a broken bird, jolts her self-pity.

“Poor thing,” she says, and touches the strap of her camera to reassure herself. Joe runs a slow hand over the front propeller.

They’re able to start the engine, which generates enough power to work the radio so Joe can mayday home. Dex promises a rescue by the evening; Polly settles underneath a nearby olive tree with her recent notes while Joe looks the warped landing gear over.

***

“Have you ever thought about getting married?” Joe asks, leaning back next to her against the trunk of the tree, a fat slice of cheese and a torn chunk of of day-old bread balanced on one knee. He’d stripped off his flight jacket in the heat and given it to her to sit on.

She puts down her notepad, thinking about her answer. “Every girl thinks about getting married.”

“And you’re every girl?”

“Some days I am.”

“But not every girl, every day?”

“I’m a reporter,” she says finally, leaving it at that. She looks over at him curiously. “Do you ever think about getting married?”

“Sometimes,” he says, to her surprise. "But no woman wants a man who's already sweet on another girl." He tips his chin eloquently in the direction of the magnificent, crippled plane in front of them.

Polly liberates a hunk of cheese from its temporary keeper, relishing the sharp, aged tang, chewing the waxy rind once the flavor melted away. "Your best gal out there," she nods in the direction of the plane as well, "is still nameless, you know."

"I know."

"What are you waiting for, then?"

Joe shifts, then says, "For her to tell me her name."

 

 

**5\. The Beginning**

She ends up tied upside-down over a pool of quicksand somewhere in the middle of the Pacific while chasing a story, which is a new personal low for several key reasons.

It improves her day immensely when they lower Joe into the pit next to her, upside down as well like the Hanged Man in a tarot deck, looking roughed up and worse for the wear.

She uses her best city voice, drawling out the words. “Hello, Joe.”

He stops struggling. “Polly. I should have known it’d be you.”

“Thanks for answering my distress call.”

“As always.” In the dim light, his eyes flick upwards to where her pencil skirt is slipping precariously downwards. “The view is somewhat better than I was expecting from the description _lowered head first into a pit of quicksand_.”

“Likewise,” she says, looking him over. Joe’s looking good these days: the busted-up lip suits him, makes him look less like a gawky apple-cheeked kid straight off the farm.

“So how’s the newspaper biz?”

She attempts to shift her hands, wondering if the catch for the zipper at the back of her skirt will provide enough friction to worry at the rope. “Same as always. How’s the… what is it now? Sky Captain-ing?”

“It pays the bills. Look, are we on the record or off?”

“You know I’m always on the record.”

“Then you know my official answer.”

They hang like rag dolls, Joe wiggling and kicking at his bound feet occasionally.

“They’re reassigning me,” she admits after a few heavy moments of silence. “Somewhere in China.”

“You don’t sound happy about that.”

“A foreign correspondent position is a big step up for me. I’m just a bit preoccupied at the moment. Ah ha!” She breaks through enough of the rope that she manages to pull her wrists apart, shaking the restraints off triumphantly. “Now let’s see what we can do.”

***

“Nanjing,” he yells, several hours later.

She nods, and dodges a shot, clumsily fired. “Nanjing.”

"Nan _jing_?"

"Are you _deaf_?" she asks, and channels her righteous anger into smashing a large imported vase over the head of the man firing shots at them. He crumples satisfyingly to the ground. She spares a moment to mourn the loss of what was undoubtedly a priceless artifact of some long lost civilization in exchange for this odious man's temporary unconsciousness. "Yes, Nanjing. Buy a map, Joe."

"I could find Nanjing in the dark wearing a blindfold," Joe snaps, rather testily, in her opinion, and grabs the unconscious guard's gun.

***

"Nanjing," Joe repeats, for the millionth time.

Polly nods, too exhausted to do much more than stare sadly at the meal in front of her and wish she was less hungry. They were safely aboard a steamer at this point, heading back to the port of San Francisco, where Dex had arranged pickup at the regional airfield for both of them the next day.

“With any luck, I’ll be there for a couple years at least. This is big for me, Joe. It really is."

Joe pokes experimentally at a mysterious slab of meat on his plate. "I'm happy for you, Polly."

"Yeah?"

"Yes. I am."

The eat in silence, chewing food with the careful skepticism universally reserved for questionable food, when Joe raises his head, cocks an eyebrow at her.

"Nanjing, huh?"

"Don't make me say it again."

"You know," he says, thoughtfully, "I think Dex always did want to see more of China."

She gapes at him mid-chew. “What?”

"I’ve heard the Flying Tigers are looking for pilots.”

“Nanjing?” she repeats, foolishly.

He’s starting to look worryingly smug now. “That’s what I’ve been told.”

“ _You_?”

“Well, I’ll have to ask Dex what he thinks, but sure. Nanjing.”

She remembers to keep chewing, the motion automatic and distant. “Huh.”

Joe starts to grin, the smile so wide and young and foolish that it catches something inside of her, and she thinks, for the first time, with something like hope, _Nanjing_.

**Author's Note:**

> If you enjoyed this story and would like to share it, please consider reblogging [this post](http://blithers.tumblr.com/post/106760287518/yuletide) on tumblr!


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